March 4, 2005

“I sold a gun to an elderly woman a few years ago and she came in about a year later, saying she needed to buy one bullet,” [store owner Kevin] McDonald said. “I thought that was curious and asked why she needed one bullet. She said someone broke into her house and she shot them. She said it didn’t take but one bullet to shoot him, so she figured she would only need one bullet for the next time.”

I’ve been waiting for Dr. David Yeagley to weigh in on the Ward Churchill controversy, and now he has.

For those of you who’ve had better things to do that track controveries about idiots in academia, here’s a brief summary. Ward Churchill is a professor and (until recently) chairman of the ethnic studies department at the University of Colorado. Shortly after the attacks of September 11, 2001, Churchill wrote an essay claiming that those killed in the attacks were not innocent civilians — those in the Pentagon were not civilians, and those in the World Trade Center were “were civilians of a sort” but not innocent. For good measure, he called the WTC victims “little Eichmans,” comparing them to the well-known Nazi.

The most that can honestly be said of those involved on September 11 is that they finally responded in kind to some of what this country has dispensed to their people as a matter of course.

That they waited so long to do so is, notwithstanding the 1993 action at the WTC, more than anything a testament to their patience and restraint.

They did not license themselves to “target innocent civilians.”

There is simply no argument to be made that the Pentagon personnel killed on September 11 fill that bill. The building and those inside comprised military targets, pure and simple. As to those in the World Trade Center . . .

Well, really. Let’s get a grip here, shall we? True enough, they were civilians of a sort. But innocent? Gimme a break. They formed a technocratic corps at the very heart of America’s global financial empire â€“ the “mighty engine of profit” to which the military dimension of U.S. policy has always been enslaved â€“ and they did so both willingly and knowingly. Recourse to “ignorance” â€“ a derivative, after all, of the word “ignore” â€“ counts as less than an excuse among this relatively well-educated elite. To the extent that any of them were unaware of the costs and consequences to others of what they were involved in â€“ and in many cases excelling at â€“ it was because of their absolute refusal to see. More likely, it was because they were too busy braying, incessantly and self-importantly, into their cell phones, arranging power lunches and stock transactions, each of which translated, conveniently out of sight, mind and smelling distance, into the starved and rotting flesh of infants. If there was a better, more effective, or in fact any other way of visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers, I’d really be interested in hearing about it.

Turns out the reason is, they needed an American Indian for their ethnic studies program. Trouble is, it turns out Ward Churchill is not an Indian. This fact — not his hateful comments, not his plagiarism, and not his fraudulent research. What a strange world we live in.

Meanwhile, actual Indians are angry — not just that he’s claiming to be an Indian, but that he’s claim to be an Indian who hates America. The Oneida Indian Nation issued a statement saying:

‘It’s disturbing that anyone would use such hateful speech, and do so while claiming to be an American Indian when there is significant evidence that he is not. Professor Churchill caused many in the media to falsely believe an American Indian scholar could besmirch the lives of those who died on 9/11. Because of this, he owes every American Indian an apology.

”Likewise it is sad that he would perpetrate this apparent hoax on Hamilton College, an institution founded to help educate Indian students.”

Ward Churchill was scheduled to speak at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York on February 3, 2005. His appearance was canceled by the college after he caused a public furor over his loathsome remarks about the 9-11 tragedy in New York. AIM’s Grand Governing Council has been dealing with Churchill’s hateful attitude and rip-off of Indian people for years.

The American Indian Movement Grand Governing Council representing the National and International leadership of the American Indian Movement once again is vehemently and emphatically repudiating and condemning the outrageous statements made by academic literary and Indian fraud, Ward Churchill in relationship to the 9-11 tragedy in New York City that claimed thousands of innocent peopleâ€™s lives.

Churchillâ€™s statement that these people deserved what happened to them, and calling them little Eichmanns, comparing them to Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, who implemented Adolf Hitlerâ€™s plan to exterminate European Jews and others, should be condemned by all.

The sorry part of this is Ward Churchill has fraudulently represented himself as an Indian, and a member of the American Indian Movement, a situation that has lifted him into the position of a lecturer on Indian activism. He has used the American Indian Movementâ€™s chapter in Denver to attack the leadership of the official American Indian Movement with his misinformation and propaganda campaigns.

Ward Churchill has been masquerading as an Indian for years behind his dark glasses and beaded headband. He waves around an honorary membership card that at one time was issued to anyone by the Keetoowah Tribe of Oklahoma. Former President Bill Clinton and many others received these cards, but these cards do not qualify the holder a member of any tribe.

Ward Churchill wants everyone to think that Indians hate America. The truth is Indians love America, more than most people here. Today there are nearly 200,000 living American Indian veterans. Thatâ€™s nearly one out of eight Indians. Churchillâ€™s fake Indian voice, though loud, is way off-key. Real Indians honor America, and are quick to honor their warriors.

The percentage of Indians in the American military is proportionately higher than that of any other group, and Indians have been fighting for America since the war of 1812. Indians have served in all the major American wars, often without acknowledgement because they werenâ€™t American citizens until 1924, when Congress declared them so. Indians serving in World War I, â€œthe Great War,â€ served as volunteers.
…
Indians serve the land of America because Indians love America. This is our home, regardless. Churchill hardly deserves a home anywhere. He certainly doesnâ€™t deserve to be associated with American Indians. A criminal embarrassment and dishonor, his success was created by professional leftist backing through the liberals of the University of Colorado.

These people are still willing to use Indians and to misrepresent Indians, to advance their anti-American agenda. Indians should protest this and reaffirm our love and devotion to our homeland.

This sounds like the sort of person I would like to have met … and to have proofread my blog (and anything else I write).

Six decades ago, not long after being hired by Harold Ross as a copy editor at The New Yorker, a shy young woman, an Oberlin graduate, set to work on a manuscript by James Thurber and soon came across the word â€œraunchy.â€ She had never heard of the word and thought it was a mistake. â€œRaunchyâ€ became â€œpaunchy.â€ Thurberâ€™s displeasure was such that the young woman barely escaped firing. Later, according to his biographer Harrison Kinney, Thurber wrote that â€œfacetiouslyâ€ was the only word in English that had all six vowels in order. What about â€œabstemiouslyâ€? the copy editor replied. Thurber, who was not easily impressed, was finally compelled to ask, â€œWho is Eleanor Gould?â€

Miss Gould, as she was known [even after she married] to everyone at the [New Yorker] magazine, died last week, at the age of eighty-seven. She worked here for fifty-four years, most of them as its Grammarian (a title invented for her), and she earned the affection and gratitude of generations of writers. She shaped the language of the magazine, always striving for a kind of Euclidean clarity–transparent, precise, muscular. It was an ideal that seemed to have not only syntactical but moral dimensions.